


Longer Ways to Go

by Glitter_Lisp



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Friendships, Gen, Homeless Jughead Jones, Homelessness, Panic Attacks, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24500629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glitter_Lisp/pseuds/Glitter_Lisp
Summary: He glances over her shoulder again, and this time she follows his gaze. When she sees what he's looking at, her jaw drops. She hadn't seen it before, but now that the door is open and there's light spilling in–“Oh my god, is someonesquattinghere?”Jughead reaches past her and shuts the closet door. She turns back to him, and the panic on his face makes it click in her head.“Oh my god,” she says again, letting out a shocked, disbelieving laugh. “Areyousquatting here?”
Relationships: Cheryl Blossom & Jughead Jones
Comments: 6
Kudos: 114





	Longer Ways to Go

**Author's Note:**

> I just........ love them

It comes over her suddenly sometimes. Of course she holds it together just fine; she has an image, she has expectations, she has a _role._ She has pep rallies and cheer practice and classes and, up until two months ago, she had a best friend to help her do it. 

She spends a lot of time hiding in the bathroom these days. Half her classmates must think she has a UTI or that she’s doing jingle jangle in the stalls, but she would rather deal with those rumors than the truth. Better they think that she's sick or high than that she's weak. Misconceptions like _that_ could get back to her parents. 

She doesn't quite make it to the bathroom, hall pass clutched tightly in white-knuckled fingers, before the panic she had felt rising in her during chemistry tears its way through her chest, and then she's crying in the hallway by the stairs and pressing her hands to her mouth like she can force the sobs back in before anyone hears them. 

Because life is the furthest thing from fair, the bell rings. This is exactly why she left class early. She thought she would have time to collect herself before everyone else was out. Clearly, she spent a little too long crying like some ridiculous dime store novel character and lost track of time. 

She can already hear doors opening, thundering footsteps and people talking and laughing on their way out of school for the day, and coming ever closer to where she's looking with ruined makeup and splotchy eyes, because she _can't stop crying._

She swears under her breath, ducks into the door under the stairs, and slams it shut behind her. 

It's dark in the closet. Her tears don't have to be pretty here. She leans back against the door and slides down it until she can curl into a tight ball, shaking with ugly sobs until her throat aches and her eyes are sore and swollen. When she's worn herself out, she simply stares into the dark in a daze, listening to the silence. School is over, and everyone's gone home. No one will see her now if she leaves. 

She doesn't leave. She can't abide the thought of going to Pop’s with the Vixens or, worse, going home to her parents. Hell, maybe she'll stay the night here in this damn closet. Maybe she'll never go home again. Maybe–

The door she's leaning against suddenly opens, and she tumbles gracelessly backwards with a shriek. 

“What the– _Cheryl?”_

She gapes upwards and upside down at Jughead Jones, who looks as shocked as she feels. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demands, reaching towards her, but she slaps his hands away and climbs to her feet herself. 

“Don't touch me, you cretin,” she snaps. “You'll get _trailer park_ all over me.”

Her usual stone cold effect is ruined by the hoarseness of her voice and what she's sure is horribly smeared makeup. He takes a step back though, hands held up in a conciliatory gesture, and he doesn't even seem to notice her appearance. His eyes flicker back and forth between her and the closet several times before they finally settle on her face. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, and she bares her teeth. 

“Don't I _look_ okay? Don't I look perfectly fine and well-adjusted? Don't I look just _perfect,_ you sadistic voyeur?”

Infuriatingly, he doesn't take the bait. “You look like you were crying in a closet,” he says instead. “And considering the Vixens didn't have practice today, I'm guessing you've been here since school let out.”

“Wouldn't you like to know,” she says stiffly. “And what are you doing here, pray tell? Do you often skulk about the school after hours? You're creepy enough already, Jones. You don't have to wander the halls in the dark to drive the point home.”

He glances over her shoulder again, and this time she follows his gaze. When she sees what he's looking at, her jaw drops. She hadn't seen it before, but now that the door is open and there's light spilling in–

“Oh my god, is someone _squatting_ here?”

Jughead reaches past her and shuts the closet door. She turns back to him, and the panic on his face makes it click in her head.

“Oh my god,” she says again, letting out a shocked, disbelieving laugh. “Are _you_ squatting here?”

“You can't tell anyone,” he says, usual bored expression twisting into something desperate and pleading that doesn't make her sad at all. To prove to herself—and to him, if he has the gall to wonder about her feelings—that she doesn't give a damn, she crosses her arms over her chest and scoffs. 

“Why not? I'm supposed to go about my day knowing there's some homeless criminal living under the stairs?”

“I'm not a criminal, Cheryl,” he says tiredly, and she scoffs again, louder. 

“Please. Breaking and entering? Trespassing? Hell, you're probably stealing food from the cafeteria and spare change from the lounge.”

He cuts his eyes away guiltily. She gapes at him. “You _are._ Oh my god, you disgusting little urchin! Forget Weatherbee, I'm calling Sheriff Keller.”

“Cheryl, _please,”_ he says when she spins towards the door, and he actually has the nerve to reach out and grab her arm. “No one– no one can know about this. You can't say anything.”

“Get your filthy, thieving hands off me,” she says icily. “Or I'll report you for assault, too.” He lets go of her like he's been burned, and she tosses her hair over her shoulder. “And in case you've forgotten, I'm _Cheryl Bombshell._ I can do whatever the hell I want.”

“What, and _this_ is what you want?” he snaps. “To blow up my entire life without a care in the world?”

“If it means keeping the school safe from a certain beanie-clad _goblin,_ then yes,” she says, louder than she intends to, but she was hiding for a reason. He found her anyway, saw her messy and tear-stained, and right now she hates everything about him. 

“I'm not hurting anyone, Cheryl!” he cries, then throws his hands up in exasperation. “Jesus, look, I’ll clear out of here right now, you don't have to call Keller.”

He rips the door open and stalks inside, yanking on a chain to turn on what is literally just a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. Cheryl hesitates, then steps into the doorway and leans against it, watching him carelessly shove books and clothes into a duffel bag. Something uncomfortable twists in her gut at the sight of him kneeling on the dusty floor, shoving his whole life into one bag. 

“Why are you even here, Harry Potter?” she asks. “Is it just for the loner aesthetic? Is it some dramatic, incomprehensible metaphor?”

“It's none of your business,” he says dully, “considering I won't even be living here anymore.” He rips the sheets off the mattress on the floor and throws them into a side pocket of the duffel. With how quickly he's breaking the room down, she has the feeling this isn't a new situation for him. Jesus. 

She examines her fingernails nonchalantly, even though he has his back to her and can't see her being so carefully casual. “I don't know. As the one who discovered your little cave, and the one who's still _very_ tempted and well within her rights to call the cops about it, I'd say it's exactly my business.”

His shoulders hunch further, and he pauses with both hands holding onto a worn paperback of some Kerouac novel. “My dad started drinking again, so I left,” he says finally, teeth gritted. “There. Happy?”

His back is still to her. She doesn't have to hide her wince. 

“Delighted,” she says, anything but. “Why not stay with your knockoff Ed Sheeran boyfriend? You're telling me Archie Andrews is okay with this whole situation?”

Jughead slams the book down and twists around on his knees to scowl at her. “Archie doesn't know. _Nobody_ knows. That was the whole _point.”_

“Hey, don't snap at me,” she says sharply. “I'm doing you a favor, letting you just leave without any consequences. Someone else might have carried through on that threat. I'm aiding and abetting here.”

She can practically hear him grinding his teeth. “Thanks for the generosity,” he says. “You're too kind.”

She smiles viciously. “I know.”

They're both silent as he finishes packing. It's only a few minutes later that he stands up, backpack slung over one shoulder and duffel bag over the other. 

“I'll walk you out,” she says. “To make sure you actually leave.”

“Believe me, I'm not coming back here,” he grunts, shouldering past her. “Come on, the alarm on the door by the teachers lounge doesn't work. It won't go off.”

She strolls after him. “My god, what did you do before you moved in here? Case the joint?”

“Yes,” he says bluntly. “Because if I got caught, they'd either send me to juvie or put me in foster care. Or, worse, they'd force me to go home.”

Cheryl rolls her eyes. “Well, obviously. That's what the authorities are supposed to do with runaways.”

Jughead actually laughs as he opens the door and they step outside. It's already getting dark. 

“You're only a runaway if someone notices you're gone.”

\-----

Jughead isn't at school the next day. Cheryl refuses to notice or care, and if she happens to take a peek in a certain now-empty closet during her free period, that's nobody's business but her own.

She spends that weekend with the Vixens and the Pussycats, shopping and going out to eat and not looking for anybody at all because it doesn't matter who she sees or where she sees them. She has more important things to worry about, like which shade of scarlet lipstick she should buy. 

Monday morning, she corners him on his way into the cafeteria. “You. Hobo.”

He grips the strap of his backpack as he turns slowly to face her, fingers flexing. “Yes, Cheryl?” he asks with exaggerated patience. 

She glances around. Most people are already inside the cafeteria. The last few stragglers are talking amongst themselves, scattered down the hallways and not near enough to overhear them. 

“Are you… okay?” she asks stiltedly, all her confidence blown to smithereens at the sight of the dark circles under his eyes, and Jughead stares at her like she's grown a second head. 

“Am I _okay?”_ he repeats, like he needs clarification, and Cheryl nods. He stares for another few seconds, then shakes his head disbelievingly. “I can't decide if you're sadistic or stupid.”

With that, he pushes through the doors and into the cafeteria. Cheryl goes back to the closet and stands in it for a few minutes, trying to imagine staying in such a small space for hours on end. She feels claustrophobic even with the door still open behind her. 

A spider runs over her foot. She flinches, turns around, and spends the rest of the lunch period hiding in the library. 

The next day he sees her waiting for him by the doors, and he spins on his heel and starts walking back the way he came. Cheryl marches after him. 

“So where are you staying now?” she asks, easily matching his pace even when he speeds up. 

“Why do you keep talking to me?” he asks. 

“Horrified fascination, I suppose,” Cheryl says thoughtfully. “Everyone likes a good sob story once in a while. Teen detective on the run from his abusive father. It's like a bad Lifetime movie.”

He stops. She stops, too, cocking an eyebrow at him. “Did I say something?”

“You've said a lot of somethings this past week,” he says shortly. “And most of them I don't care about because screw it, what's it matter? But my dad's not _abusive.”_

“He literally drank you out of house and home,” Cheryl says, forcing out a laugh. “How is that not abuse?”

“It was my decision to leave,” Jughead says sharply. “He didn't tell me to get out. He just– things just weren't good between us, okay?”

“What's the difference between driving you away and kicking you out?” Cheryl demands. “The story still ends with you living in a closet.”

“No, the story ends with me living under a bridge,” Jughead snaps. “In case you've forgotten, I was recently evicted.”

That pulls her up short. “Wait, really? You're just, what, living outside?”

“I have a tent,” Jughead says, almost reasonably. “Oh,” Cheryl says weakly, trying and not quite succeeding at pulling herself together. “Well, Kerouac fan like you, you're probably loving it.” 

She feels dazed, her stomach sick and cold _._

Jughead’s expression doesn't help matters. “Yeah,” he says roughly, “I'm living the dream. Leave me the hell alone, Cheryl.”

He starts walking again, and this time she doesn't follow.

She does plan to leave him alone, now that she's got her horrible answers, but two hours later Sheriff Keller and Principal Weatherby walk in and arrest him in front of the class, just like they did to Cheryl a month before. 

_Homeless criminal,_ she thinks hysterically, and she wonders whether he was still living at home on July fourth, and whether that would make a difference at all. 

He's back at school the next day. She walks up to him in the lounge while he's getting a soda from the vending machine. He winces when he sees her coming. 

“Look, I wasn't even there,” he says as a can drops heavily to the bottom of the machine. “I was working, you can ask–”

She grabs his hand, reaches into her pocket, and shoves the handful of bills she nicked from her dad’s wallet into his open palm. 

“There,” she grits out. “Get yourself a new place. Somewhere with a _ceiling.”_

He stares at her then looks down at the money in his hand, and his eyes go wide. “This– Jesus, how much money is this?”

“I don't know, I didn't look,” she says. “Are we even?”

He looks around the room and lowers his voice. “Cheryl, this is _six hundred dollars._ What is wrong with you?”

“Do you want more?” she asks. “I can get it for you. Just get a hotel room so I can stop worrying about you.”

That seems to surprise him more than the cash. “What, _now_ you're worried about me? You're the reason I'm–”

“I am aware of that, thank you,” she hisses. “But even a miscreant like you doesn't deserve to be… where you are. And I might be the one who put you there, but now I'm fixing it.” She lets out a relieved sigh and smiles brightly. “There. My conscience is clear. We can go back to never crossing paths again.”

“Sure we could,” Jughead says, “if I was taking it.” Her jaw drops, and he repeats her gesture from just a moment before, grabbing her hand and shoving the money into. “I know how you Blossoms work,” he whispers fiercely. “I'm not putting myself in your debt.”

“You're not,” Cheryl says, scowling. She tries to hand him the money back, but he refuses to take it. “This is making us _even._ I ruined where you were staying, and now I'm giving you enough to find a new place. That's got to be enough to rent a hotel room at least until the end of the semester, right?”

“No, see, you're not buying your way out of this,” he says. “Because of you, I live under a fucking _bridge._ You feel guilty?” He bares his teeth in something that could, optimistically, be called a smile. “Good.”

He hefts his backpack more securely over his shoulder and stalks past her, leaving her silent and shellshocked with a handful of crumpled hundred dollar bills in her hand. He doesn't even take his soda with him. 

She goes out of her way to avoid him after that. He doesn't bother to do the same. She doesn't think it's deliberate, the way he keeps showing up wherever she is. Riverdale is a small town, and they've always shared classes together. She's just never noticed him there. Now it's like she can't stop noticing. 

She sneaks out to Pop’s one night after her parents have gone to bed and she can't stand to be in the house for another second. It's barely dark, but that's late by Riverdale standards. The only other person there is Jughead Jones, bent over his laptop at a booth in the back. Cheryl finds herself walking towards him before she decides to do soit, but she pulls up short a few feet away. 

He has a black eye. 

“What the hell happened to you?” she demands. 

“Hi, Cheryl, nice to see you,” he intones. “How are you today? And nothing interesting, to answer your question.”

She marches forward the last few steps and slides into the booth across from him, scowling. “What, are you making money by being a punching bag now?”

“No,” he says wryly. “I’m not making any money off of it. My work as a punching bag is purely pro bono.”

“Let me help you,” Cheryl says, leaning forward. “I can fix this, I swear.”

“I don't need your help or your pity,” Jughead snaps, and Cheryl slams her hand onto the table so loudly that he jumps. 

“Screw your pride!” she snarls. “And my pity, and whatever vengeance you think you're acting out by refusing to let me help. You're hurting yourself more than me, and you know it.”

“The money wouldn't have helped,” Jughead says flatly. “You said to get a hotel room, but no one's going to give a fifteen-year-old a room. The kind of place that would, or that would let me bribe them into it…” He shrugs. “Let's just say I'm safer on the streets.”

“So don't do either,” Cheryl snaps. “Move into my house.”

Jughead looks flabbergasted, mouth flapping uselessly a few times before he manages, “Seriously? You want me to move into _Thornhill?”_

Cheryl wrinkles her nose. “Ew, no. You'd stink up the place with your depression and poor life choices. You could live in Thistlehouse, our guesthouse. No one stays there. Mummy and Daddy wouldn't even have to know.”

“And what do you get out of it?” Jughead asks. “Am I supposed to be your kept boy or something?”

Cheryl gags theatrically. “God, no. Sitting across from you is the closest I can stand to get without feeling ill. As for me, I would…” She looks down and starts tracing absent patterns on the table with her finger. Her other hand, below the table, twists in the hem of her shirt. “I… feel bad,” she says softly, reluctantly. “I made a mistake, forcing you out of the school like that. I wasn't thinking then, about where you would go.”

“I got the feeling you weren't thinking at all,” Jughead says tiredly. “You were angry, and you took it out on me.”

She flushes despite her best efforts. “I don't like people people seeing me cry.”

“And I don't like being forced onto the streets, either,” Jughead says. There's no heat to the words. Every line of his body spells exhaustion, from his tense shoulders and dull eyes to his trembling fingers and rumpled clothes. 

“So let me get you off of them,” Cheryl… well, she begs. There's not another word for it. “You don't even have to stay. I'll give you a key, and you can just crash for a night whenever you need to, okay? It's getting cold. You're going to die out there like this.”

Jughead looks torn, but then he glances down at his backpack, leaned up against his booth. 

“You're not gonna leave me alone until I say yes, are you?”

“Not really,” she says. “Some people call the Blossoms stubborn. We prefer determined.”

Jughead huffs out a soft laugh. “Yeah, I guess that's one word for it. Seriously, though, what are you getting out of this?”

“I can't just do something nice?” Cheryl asks, not quite as offended as she would like to be. 

“Historically, no.”

She sighs. “Hell if I know. I really do just feel… guilty, and that isn't an emotion I'm particularly familiar with.” He looks ready to retort, and she narrows her eyes at him. “So I'm _trying_ to make it better.”

“By moving me into your mansion,” he says. “Like Oliver Twist.”

“Oh, don't be such a drama queen,” Cheryl scoffs. “You're much more of a Little Orphan Annie.”

To her surprise—and his, going by his startled expression—Jughead bursts out laughing. Cheryl stares for a moment, wide-eyed, but the tension has been broken and she finds herself giggling helplessly along with him, covering her face like she can pretend she's still calm about this. 

“Okay, Mommy Warbucks,” Jughead says finally, still snickering. “So where's this mysterious guesthouse?”

Cheryl dabs at tears that are almost certainly from laughter and not any other emotion, like sorrow or anger or bone-melting relief that she's not going to fail someone else. “Get your bags and put them in my car,” she says. “I'll drive you home.”


End file.
